Aborigine genes

At http://phys.org/print375620395.html ... a gene sequence of Aboriginal men show they are all descendants of distant ancestors that reached Australia in the remote past. The figure being bandied about is 50,000 years ago, a number whisked out of the hat as it complies, it would seem, with maintream thinking. The research is published in Current Biology Feb 2016 and is confined to Y chromosomes only - and to be fully acceptable the genetic evidence will have to be extended to other genetic avenues, such as mitochondrial DNA. Nevertheless, it is significant in that it shows that in the male line there is a direct line of descent back to a remote period when it is thought Aborigines might have arrived in that part of the world.

At the same time, and it might be the way the news blurb is worded, one gets the impression there was an eagerness to dispel any connection with new arrivals in Australia from India, between 3000 and 2000BC - bringing with them the Indian village dog that became the dingo. As such, the news blurb spends as much time debunking the idea of recent arrivals, if only 5000 to 4000 thousand years ago, than it does of the more important evidence that Aborigines have been in Australia for a long time, arriving at a time when Europe was populated by Neanderthals.